I know a lot of us here have written for RetroJunk in the past. With the site's uncertain future I think it would be wise to import articles over to Retro-Daze. I was kind of thinking of doing a "Remastered" series where I took some of my articles and edited/reformatted them for the site. 

I did this when I first arrived with my Vor-Tech article. I was planning on doing it with all three of my articles on RJ but never got around to doing them.

Sounds like a very good idea. I was on RetroJunk two days ago and saw almost no activity. If the sites goes I wonder if all the content will be saved in archive or only a portion?

eddstarr wrote :

Sounds like a very good idea. I was on RetroJunk two days ago and saw almost no activity. If the sites goes I wonder if all the content will be saved in archive or only a portion? -end quote

I'm sure you'll still be able to find stuff on the payback machine.

Rick Ace Rhodes wrote :

eddstarr wrote :


Sounds like a very good idea. I was on RetroJunk two days ago and saw almost no activity. If the sites goes I wonder if all the content will be saved in archive or only a portion? -end quote

I'm sure you'll still be able to find stuff on the payback machine.

It's a real shame what happened to Retro Junk. I found the site nearly ten years ago, and in less then a decade it went completely downhill. I'm glad Vaporman managed to put together another website for us to relive our nostalgia, but RJ is such a sad story.

-end quote

You can say that again. As one of the Generation-1 websites from the birth of the internet, RetroJunk was the first concentration fansites of old TV and movies. 

I think it's a fine idea. Perhaps we can create a new category for these articles (like we have Photog Smurf Approved, Contest Winner, Featured, Official...) and call it maybe "RJ Classics" or something like that.

I approached this idea back at Retro con and in fact have already submitted one of my articles. Clearly Rick has already also beat us to the punch with his article re-published here. I like the Remastered title and say go for it vkimo looking forward to your remastered series. For me with the article I have already submitted, it was a chance to re-do and improve upon my original idea. I am not sure what proprietary rights Retro Junk has but considering that we are the original authors I felt that I could import it here. I called it a Retro-Junk Retrospective and it is obviously the first of a series for me. I improved upon mine and changed things drastically. However the concepts and some of the pictures are the same. I feel that if we mention that it was first published at Retro-Junk and if the articles are changed slightly (for the better) there can be no bad blood towards our newfound retro playground. In the art world you only need to change something 30% then it becomes an homage instead of a copy and since you cannot plagiarize yourself as we are the authors I see no legal problems. The pictures were likely gotten from public sources anyways. I also added new content so even though it is my old article it is an entirely new piece taken as a whole.

I wonder if there are copyright and other legal roadblocks regarding this. Sure you may be the authors but I'd check the user agreements and other clauses RetroJunk uses to verify whether they claim some sort of ownership of whatever articles the users produce. 

Linux_Sage wrote :

I wonder if there are copyright and other legal roadblocks regarding this. Sure you may be the authors but I'd check the user agreements and other clauses RetroJunk uses to verify whether they claim some sort of ownership of whatever articles the users produce.  -end quote

Linux I think you were right to suggest that we look into it, and I did.

I think there is no problem whatsoever. First I could not even locate a copyright visible on Retro Junk although he likely has one. Second hypothetically if he decided he did have some proprietary rights and attempted to go after this site in court he could land himself in trouble because he uses unlicensed images of iconic characters, images of films, and television all over his site (using the reasoning to go after us in the first place). However even that doesn't jive because Fair use in US copyright law covers us (and him, and any other fansites of licensed properties i.e. toys, films, television, cartoon, food products, etc or just about anything we cover in our nostalgia).

Fair use covers this specific issue I think even if we quote ourselves verbatim for the text and for the pictures as they were likely garnered from our own sources (personal) or public sources (previously put out to public access on the web) so we are not stealing our own creative works we are just republishing it in a new form, anthology, or what you will with a different publisher or venue. Authors do it all the time and unless they specifically sign over the rights to the works they retain them. We were not paid by him to write the articles so there are no first sale doctrines, we voluntarily submitted them as we do here.

We have a good faith defense even if we are in error because it is reasonable to believe one's own views, memories, stories, and history can be told and retold and are possibly biographical in nature or our express opinions if we are reviewing products and it is reasonable to suppose that we retain rights to our own writing whether explicitly put down in terms of contract or not, which we never formally did with either RetroJunk or RetroDaze. Now if some other clod tried to copy our works as their own we or the sites may have recourse. Or if some nerdbomber tried to copy their sites exactly it could be a problem. Whereas we are reposting our own stuff I think there is little anyone could do to stop us.

At any rate such frequent mention of RetroJunk  in our articles and on the site here is free advertising for him and an homage to the great site it once was. The only thing created by these sites and covered by copyright would be the sites themselves. The creative works on the sites would be under those who created them in my opinion. While not entirely in the public domain (the reason why the wayback machine and internet archive are not sued to the stone age for completely copying websites) our works are publicly accessible and if we decide to put them out there again I feel it is our prerogative.

Bottom line is this he cannot assert copyright ownership over our works because he cannot establish ownership through authorship (we are the authors), it is not a tangible medium i.e. published book, record, toy, etc., each of our works was never registered for copyright (required for litigation), and in the case of the already said and done Rick's article and mine that is submitted but not yet up both mention that it was previously published on Retrojunk.

I feel we are covered by Copyright infringement rules, Copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright act, and Fair Use.

NLogan, Ace Attorney, everybody!

i already beat you to that, vkimo